Making Sense of Doing Wrong: On the Justification of Compromise Decisions

Abstract

This paper holds that compromises are a kind of agreement and also a kind of decision. The main objectives are: 1) to identify the formal structure of compromise situations, or predicaments where some compromise decision (CD) is unavoidable, including CDs that jeopardize the decision-maker’s integrity; 2) through Amartya Sen’s notions of basic and compulsive judgments, to establish when a CD in a situation of compromise could be morally justified. It concludes that justified CDs involve a rationally justified moral regret which helps to bridge the gap between deontology and consequentialism.